Search for: Go

Green Notes - 13 Oct 08

By Chinthana ⋅ October 14, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

• A NASA/university team has published the first global satellite maps of the key greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in Earth’s mid-troposphere, an area about 8 kilometers, or 5 miles, above Earth. The team’s study reveals new information on how carbon dioxide, which directly contributes to climate change, is distributed in Earth’s atmosphere and moves around our world. Patterns of carbon dioxide distribution were also found to differ significantly between the northern hemisphere, with its many land masses, and the southern hemisphere, which is largely covered by ocean. The rest of the article from Sustainablog provides an interesting commentary on the NASA research.
• An interesting read was published on Earth2Tech on the impact of the global economic downturn on the emissions market. The Earth2Tech article reads “There is so much bad news spinning out of the financial markets these days that it might be hard to spare a few moments for carbon trading markets. But the dramatic freezing up of credit around the world may threaten to spill over into the nascent market for trading carbon emissions, with potential further consequences for the global climate…” Meanwhile, Reuters published the following article along the same lines: “New carbon commodities are government-guaranteed in the climate change fight, but are still too complex and immature to provide a haven for investors fleeing financial markets’ route….“
• Even with all the talk about renewable energy and energy efficiency in Washington, the media and Silicon Valley these days, adoption of such technologies in the U.S. is still very low — solar power made up just 1 percent of the renewable energy consumed in 2007. But two entrepreneurs, Diane Loviglio and Kurt Brown, along with the two dozen members of their team, have created a web site called Wattbot that acts as a sort of middle man for interested consumers and energy providers, which they hope will help speed the adoption of clean power and energy-efficiency tools. Hopefully websites like Wattbot will help us get moving on switching to renewables on a much larger scale. Wattbot launches in January and will have detailed info about alternative energy options, with access free for consumers. In the mean time, they have some fun items to play with, such as a clean energy density map.